At Home in the World

What's for Dinner at Chicago's Alinea

What's for Dinner at Chicago's Alinea

Steelhead Roe

"The actual fish eggs are produced by a friend of mine, the first chef I ever worked for. He’s no longer a chef but he’s producing these wonderful roes and maple syrups and vinegars. Every year, when he gets the harvest in, he tastes them and emails me the flavor profile. He describes it like wine. Some years he says, “very tropical, fruity”; sometimes he says, “really, really salty with ginger notes or cilantro.” When I hear that, I react to it and base the dish around it. So in this case, he sent me: “It is very tropical and reminds me of lime and cilantro, but it has a sweet fruitiness to it.” So I take that information and I cross it with seasonality and I say, What works? Watermelon. So we make a watermelon mousse. We take lime leaves and wrap it with raw watermelon to give it some texture and accent it with sour herbs, sorrel (it tastes like tart lemon or lime)."

Salad Centerpiece

"At Alinea, not only do we look at products that are seasonal, but we ask what the emotional triggers are. So we’ll literally stand around and say, 'When you think of summer, what do you think of?' One guy said, 'I think of walking through a garden with my father and rubbing up against the basil and tomato plants and what that smells like in the morning when there’s dew on the ground and you pluck a tomato and eat it right in the garden.' I thought, that’s perfect, we need to capture that in the experience in Alinea. That’s what I put on the table.

We work with a local farmer who grows us a very specific blend of herbs and vegetables that we plant in organic potting soil on a piece of slate. That piece of garden goes on the table when the guests arrive. That will become your centerpiece: the equivalent of a flower on your table. About midway through your meal, the front-of-house comes over and presents not a fork or a knife—they give you scissors. They put them down for each person and they say, 'Coming out in a couple seconds is a gazpacho course. You can clip the herbs from the center of your table, you can harvest them.'"

Uni Bowl

"The most important thing about this to me is not what you consume, not even what you eat. What is not represented well in this photo is that that bowl is completely round on the bottom. So you simply cannot put it down. It’ll fall over. That was intentional.

We were looking at: What are the best meals that people have? It’s when people literally hand them food. That’s what we were going for. Put it down on any flat surface, it will fall over and spill out everything that’s in it. That means that when the food is put in the bowl in the kitchen, it’s picked up by a front-of-house team member, they walk it up the stairs, they present it to the guest, that guest has to pick it up out of their hands and not put it down, and then they have to eat out of it. To me, that’s an exercise that’s never been done in four-star environment. The protocol is that everything has to be put down in front of the guest—but break that model, make them pick it up. The food is almost irrelevant. We can put whatever we want in that course, but to me it’s about the space between patron and employee at that point. To us, the emotion is the thing."

2D-3D

"This one is complicated. We are really involved with a collaboration between myself and Crucial Detail design studio. [For 2D-3D] you’re presented with [the two-dimenstional pieces of] a plate, and you are asked to build the frame. And then the front-of-house comes and drapes something over the frame that becomes the bowl [for a serving of sous vided curry pork belly].

The idea is that the centerpiece that is put on the table to start the meal—a rice-paper flag—at some point becomes an edible portion of the experience. Those rice paper things get draped over the frame that gets built by the guest. The idea being you come in, you sit down, here’s an object that looks really cool and you have no idea what it is. And at some point you eat it! We’ve done about 75 pieces with Crucial Detail. It’s really fun." See how it works in this video.

Chocolate Mat

"When you go to a restaurant, every restaurant you’ve ever been to, you have eaten off of what? Why? Why are we limited to a ten-by-ten plate? We shouldn’t be. How can we break that mold? How can we make the entire table a plate? At one point we had a giant porcelain plate, and then Martin at Crucial Detail design studio said, 'Think about it as a tablecloth, and now you have the entire table you can play with.' So instead of beautiful French linen draping over the table, we throw down silicone, and now we have carte blanche. Now we come out and just throw the food all over the tables. And people say it’s the best thing ever."